SimCity Pacing

Jun 11, 2013

Gameplay Scripter Jason Halvorson

Hello, SimCity fans! My name is Jason Halvorson and I’m a gameplay scripter here at Maxis. In this blog I’d like to share one of my strategies when developing a city. One of the more crucial stages in any city’s development takes place right at the beginning. Sure, laying out a good road network and thinking ahead in terms of the layout of your future city is pinnacle for a successful city, but pacing the growth of your city will make the journey along the way enjoyable for both you and your Sims. As the Mayor you have several tools at your fingertips to control the how and when buildings increase in density. Let me show you.

When I’m playing SimCity, I’m constantly keeping my eye on the Detail tab of the Population window.

I try my best to make sure the citizens of my city have enough jobs and enough stores to shop in to ensure they’re being satisfied.

(Pro tip: Try to make sure your unemployed number is at 0. Having some unfilled jobs is perfectly fine as workplaces have the ability to employ more people than they require.)

For me, the problem would surface at the point when my city’s buildings density up. To my dismay, a large portion of my city would density up at nearly the same time. Not only would my numbers fall out of whack, but my reliance on utilities like power, water, and sewage disposal would increase at a rate that was difficult for me to keep up with!

To better pace the development of my city, I use the Dezone tool. I zone what type of buildings I want and as soon as they show up, I dezone the block. The simulation will no longer attempt to increase the density or wealth level of these buildings without my say so.

The areas that are bright green are ready for a density upgrade. Upgrade the road to the density you desire and zone a stretch of Residential, Commercial or Industrial. The size of the zone you mapped out will determine how many buildings density up. Be careful not to zone too much if you only want one building of the next density level! Also, dezone as soon as the building shows up.

Aside from the pacing benefit, it’s helpful to be able to select where your higher density buildings show up for both aesthetic and utilitarian reasons.

I like to stagger the higher density buildings so they face opposite directions which I find helps with traffic. When buildings all face the same direction, they overload one side of the block which leaves the other side of the block underutilized.

Also, for those of us who prefer not to density their city up at all, this method also allows you to upgrade your roads without the buildings upgrading as well. It can come in handy when a lot of your traffic is being held up by busses or garbage trucks, but don’t want higher density buildings.

Well, that’s it! Hopefully you find this style of play useful in creating your cities. Give it a try and let me know how it works out for you. I would also love to hear the any tips or strategies you’ve picked up along the way as well so please feel free to share them on our forums. Thanks everyone!

Comments

This is about kind of how I play the game... Most of my cities lack big skylines and tend to look more like suburban areas... Even if there's lots of commercial and industrial development hitting the mid-density range.

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This is exactly what I do. One other key thing I do is immediately downgrade the road to low density. The key is that low capacity roads do not create intersections with lights, which can really bog down traffic flow. I have a few high density main thoroughfares that intersect low density streets and almost no traffic lights, just four way stops! Try it, it really helps!

Sadly sometime you get problems with forcing high density to go/face where you want. Either it builds centered in a 2x1 block or you get a smaller building facing the wrong direction, blocking upgrades of other buildings (in 2x2 block corners)

Given how important it is to keep checking the population window, wouldn't it be great if it opened to the detailed figures and not the mostly-pointless graphs, rather than me having to click the Detail tab EVERY TIME I open the window?

The problem with this blog article's approach for controlling density is that it is a workaround (however ineffective) to broken zoning. In fact, the very existence of this workaround SHOWS the broken-ness of SimCity's current zoning. This is coming from a gameplay scripter, someone responsible for creating how the game works. That bears saying again: The person responsible for creating how the game WORKS is proffering a workaround that illustrates how the game DOESN'T work.

Zoning should make neighborhood take on the desired density and function the city planners set. If you set the zoning, wait for the block to get to the desired density, and de-zone... congratulations, you have fixed the neighborhood to the desired density and function - the point of zoning... through DE-zoning.

Then, a disaster or fire comes through, and you have to re-zone to allow a replacement building to be built.
Now that your city is older, the building that comes out of the zoning will, most likely, NOT match the zoning that you built.

So, after each disaster you get to play whack-a-mole, but with a two-step of dealing with the disaster AND (likely unsuccessfully) trying to re-create the original zoning.

At the least, the zoning should allow setting low, medium and high density. The density levels could be shown visually by the level of saturation of the zoning's color, by the thickness of the lines, or by some sort of texturing (crosshatch, checkerboard... I don't really care as long as it's obvious)

Hi This article was very helpful, thanks for writing it. I was thinking it would be cool if you guys could add one way streets, also I think it would be neat to be able to put overpasses. Like a highway with exits around you're city. One last thing would be cool, if there're was a pier. Thanks bye.

After all, it is illegal for an organization/company to take money (advertising something), and not provide a product or service in return. In other words, about 500k people COULD potentially sue EA for fraud. Just putting that out there. :D

And also, not many people like companies that advertise something, like a promise, and then break that promise... Including me.

EA or whoever you are, you know your game is broken stop giving me strategies. FIX YOUR GAME, IT DOES NOT WORK!!!!!!!. You had a great game, SimCity 4, and you gave us this. what real city or town does not have one way roads and overpasses, among many other things you took out of the game. Are you people really serious about this less than a quarter of a game you sold me, I would have felt better if you had robbed me at gunpoint and took my 80 dollars. And to top that off you are already selling additional content for a game that does not work properly, after patch 4.0 nothing in my game works. Fire trucks drive right past a fire, go to the next intersection make a u turn go down the opposite side, and keeps going around and around until the building is on the ground. Give me a game, that works or make sense. This simcrap is not even work 20 bucks.

The one problem with this approach is that citizens in the game will start building wherever is desirable to build. This means the mayor is running around with a bulldozer destroying buildings that he does not like or just leaves them.

This is better than just following the games suggestions of upping the road density when the people are ready for it.

Well, this would be cool if I had the Mac version so I could play but I'm not getting the game cause I think the way they sold it to people to pre order and wake up to find out that it might come out in August. I think that's very wrong I'm not gonna support it by giving them my money. I waited when I told me spring and when they told me summer but I'm not gonna wait until fall it does not another whole year to make a mac version when the pc version will have been out for close to a year.

I love what this game could be if they fix it. Bigger maps, Tools to make car tunnels, Subways, Overpasses, One way streets, multiple entrances/exits to city's, More lanes on the entrances and exits to city's, Tera-forming of the land, and Offline play. All of this should be standard with a Simcity game.

What you really need is another type of zoning which toggles automatic density upgrades. It would accordingly change the colour of the zones from dark colours to light colours (or vice versa). This would mean that buildings would still be rebuilt in the zone.

It is counter-intuitive to a planner's thinking to dezone an area. You control building density by planning zones for the density you want. The suggestion by others about setting low medium and high densities and showing them visually by saturation color is exactly how older version of the game worked. It was disappointing to see that tool go. Using the size of streets as the determining factor on building density is reflective of a car based philosophy which so many cities are moving away from. In reality the size of a city street often does not impact the size of the buildings along it. Just tour London , Paris, New York to see. The absence of subways further emphasizes this old 20th century car based approach. Streetcars are great but look at the size of street needed to accommodate them. The game makes you build a street to hold more cars in order to provide alternative transportation that seeks to reduce the need for cars. Again, counter-intuitive.

I just opened the game after a few months of not playing, hoping there might be some improvements to at least get me to tolerate the biggest disappointment in gaming for me in the past decade. While it was updating I stumbled across this blog article. A game scripter giving us a shortcut on yet another broken aspect of this game. I cancelled the update. EA you are a joke and I hope you go bankrupt.

I don't like this "strategy". Let's say I want to keep my housing at low-density, so I dezone it, like this guy is telling me to. Not only does that prevent it from being upgraded to a medium-density building, it ALSO keeps it from being upgraded to the type of building that reflects improving land values. I like to see those crummy double-wides turn into larger homes, and then into mansions if I'm doing everything right. How come I have to give this up in order to prevent apartment buildings from popping up just because I dared to set down an avenue in the first place? I wish I could find my old SC4 disc one, so I could re-install that and play a game that's more fun. Heck, I'd even be happy to go back to SC3. I feel like we're back in version 1.0 of this game, in the mid-90's with hardly any functionality or reflection of real life at all!

Maxis........ why must you torture us with this bad gameplay......? How do you have the nerve to put out dlc's when pretty much all of your customers are wanting the game fixed? I am sure that we would all love these dlc's after you fix the problems at hand, but for now, FIX THE DENSITY PROBLEM!!!

Come on EA, don't be idiots. Your own programmer is giving us tips to fix the traffic because its so bugged. Fix the game and give us what we want. EA as a company is more stubborn than Microsoft. At least they listened to what we, your CUSTOMERS wanted, albeit it took a while. you are loosing customers, both current and potential. You really screwed yourselves over.

Yeah I agree these recommendations are asinine. Perhaps creating useful zoning tools that allow us to zone to a density we want regardless of the road densities. Do away with the CRAPTASTIC way the zones are laid out and never are they the same when u lay 2 parallels strips of zones.

Also the recommendation of staggering the homes on different streets is stupid. You then need to create another road behind your buildings and the more roads you have the more you CANNOT DIRECT TRAFFIC or FORCE IT TO go WHERE YOU WANT. Traffic is so borked that those opinions are INCREDULOUS.

I agree, working around a bug is not fixing the bug, I don't know about the math involved with the population, all I know is that the traffic is unreasonable no matter what the population is. It has ruined the game for me, I do check every now and then to see if the problem is fixed (sorry just day dreaming I guess), but I wont play it until it is. CitiesXL for me is way better at this time. EA has heard all the complaints and either doesn't listen or doesn't care or doesn't know how to fix it. A piece of useless bytes from what could have been great.........